She writes plays while her brother's best friend brings the drama in this spicy New Adult read Harlequin Junkie says is perfect for “anyone looking for a unique story line, some smouldering sex, and two people not necessary looking for their happily ever after, but they might find it anyway!”

Synopsis

Who knew love could bring a playwright so much drama?

Writing three plays for a nationally acclaimed theater in Phair, Texas, was never supposed to put Ashlyn Carter’s inheritance at risk or make or break her future. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to force her into constant contact with the very guy she’s avoided since her teenage crush-gone-bad days.

Noah Blake. He's Ashlyn’s enemy, for good reason. As her older brother's best friend, he seems hell-bent on interfering with nearly every aspect of her life. So how then does he also seem to be her muse?

When Ashlyn reluctantly agrees to act out scenes with Noah from the play she’s writing in order to trigger her creativity, the spark of passion she’d felt for him as a teenager flares up again. But there’s more at stake than just her future as a playwright or the inheritance she never cared about in the first place. Finding out the theater she loves is in danger of closing puts everything she thought she knew and felt about Phair…and Noah...to the test. Will there be a standing ovation for Ashlyn Carter, playwright, or will the curtain drop and fade to black? Only by facing their biggest fears together will Ashlyn and Noah learn to trust in themselves and each other.

Excerpt

Here’s the set-up. Lucas Marshall, owner of The Marshall Theater, has just given Ashlyn an ultimatum—work with Noah, her big brother’s best friend and Ashlyn’s sworn enemy, to overcome her writer’s block that’s appeared at a very inopportune time (threatening her inheritance, career, and the fate of the theater itself). Noah, too, has a stake in the game. The town of Phair was founded around The Marshall. If it fails, so too will his bar. Equally important, Noah has just discovered another threat—a theater critic set on revenge against Ashlyn for a past transgression. But if there’s one thing you can count on Noah Blake to do, it’s protect what he considers his, no matter the cost. In this scene, from Noah’s point of view, he appears at Ashlyn’s door, attempting to convince her that Lucas’s plan to overcome her writer’s block and save the theater is valid.

Excerpt from Fair Play

The door opened. She stood, blinking at me. Then, without saying a word, she pulled ear buds from her ears and placed them, along with her iPod, on the table beside the door. Her arms dropped. “I don’t have time for this, Noah.”

Stepping through the threshold, I reached for her wrist and snapped on the cuffs, an abandoned favor from last week’s bachelorette party at the Double Shot.

Her blue eyes widened, then she forced a controlled facade. She raised our conjoined wrists. “So you’re into kink. But I don’t think that’s the way this is supposed to work. Obviously, you need pointers.” She scanned the small, spartan room, consisting of a loveseat, coffee table, and a fake ficus tree. “I might have a fifty-shades-of-something book you could borrow.”

With my cuffed hand, I reached behind me and closed the door, jerking Ashlyn’s body against mine in the process.

Mistake.

My cock instantly hardened. All I could think about was how she smelled, like moonlight and summer. How her white tank clung to her torso, contoured over bare breasts to the point where I swore I could just make out the vaguest tinge of rose-colored nipples. How she turned me on without even trying, like no one ever had.

As my cuffed hand found hers and I finagled her arm so that it bent comfortably behind her back, wispy strands of auburn hair, twisted into an awkward bun at the side of her neck, tickled my face. Her pulse beneath my fingertips jumped. I inhaled her sweet scent as my heart rate went into overdrive along with hers. A primitive ache with the need to fill her settled in my bones.

But a man did not touch his best friend’s little sister. Quinn had asked me years ago to look out for her, and as we’d pledged in our fraternity as freshman, a promise once made is never broken.

“The cuffs are to prove a point,” I said. In spite of the warning going off in my head, my lips grazed her temple when my opposite arm circled her waist.

Ashlyn rose on toes, bringing us hip-to-hip so my erection was closer to where God intended, like she was testing how well we’d fit. Her eyes darkened a shade and I could tell she knew exactly what she was doing. Having her against me like this was bending the rules. Bending, I reminded myself, wasn’t breaking. She also had that weird look—the one that told me she understood what I was thinking before I did.

It was also the look she got before she became the world’s biggest smartass.

“So,” she drawled out. “Not into kink. But it appears after all these years, I’ve been wrong about you. You’re not a eunuch, after all.”

“Not even close, sweetheart.” My free hand covered her ass. My fingertips found bare skin beneath the curve of her shorts, and despite her bravado, she twitched.

After the birth of her children, Tracy had an epiphany: banking just wasn’t her thing. So she quit her corporate job, let her nanny go and became a not-so-desperate housewife by day, Sexy Women’s Fiction author by night. Her characters are every-day women, following their dreams, searching for that elusive happily ever after.